Authors: Martin Gilbert
The Germans encouraged these actions, offering the local peasantry rewards if they would deliver Jews to them. ‘As a rule,’ Philip Friedman has written, ‘it was no more than some quarts of vodka, several pounds of sugar or salt, cigarettes, or, occasionally, small sums of money.’
52
One of those who perished at Ukrainian hands in Lvov was the well-known Yiddish writer Alter Kacyzne, from Vilna, who had fled to Lvov as a refugee in 1940. There, during the year and a half of Soviet rule, he served as a spokesman for the many Jewish writers in the city, and was appointed by the Soviet authorities to be literary director of the Yiddish-language broadcast on Radio Lvov.
53
With the German invasion of Russia, Kacyzne fled from Lvov. But on the way to Tarnopol he was seized by Ukrainians, and beaten to death.
54
Within five
weeks
of the German invasion of Russia on June 22, the number of Jews killed exceeded the total number killed in the previous eight
years
of Nazi rule. The invasion of Russia had provided the Germans with an opportunity hitherto lacking: a remote region, the cover of an advancing army, vast distances, local collaborators, and an intensified will to destroy. The first ‘five-figure’ massacre ended on July 31, in Kishinev, after fourteen days’ uninterrupted slaughter, in which ten thousand Jews were murdered.
55
Similar mass executions were taking place in every city: in Zhitomir more than two and a half thousand had been murdered.
56
It was in Zhitomir, at the end of July, that the regimental commander of the regular German troops in the city, Major Rosier, on hearing rifle volleys and pistol shots, decided to investigate.
Accompanied by two of his officers, he went in the direction of the shooting. As he drew nearer, he saw soldiers and civilians hurrying from all directions towards a railway embankment. The scene which confronted him when he reached the embankment was ‘so brutally base’, he wrote five months later, ‘that those who approached unprepared were shaken and nauseated’.
Rosier was looking down into a ditch filled with corpses. Among them he saw an old man with a white beard and a cane on his arm. The man was still breathing. At the top of the embankment stood German policemen in bloodstained uniforms. German soldiers were congregating in groups. It was a hot day, and some of the soldiers were wearing bathing shorts. Civilians, too, were watching, together with their wives and children. ‘I saw nothing like it,’ Rosier wrote, ‘either in the First World War or during the Civil War in Russia or during the Western Campaign. I have seen many unpleasant things, having been a member of the Free Corps in 1919, but I never saw anything like this.’
Five months after he had looked in the execution ditch in Zhitomir, Major Rosier was still determined to voice his sense of outrage. In an official report to his superiors, he wrote: ‘I cannot begin to conceive the legal decisions on whose basis these executions were carried out. Everything that is happening here seems to be absolutely incompatible with our views on education and morality.’
‘Right out in the open,’ Rosier continued, ‘as if on a stage, men murder other men. I must add that according to the accounts of the soldiers, who often see spectacles of this kind, hundreds of people are thus killed daily.’
57
Rosier, with his concern for ‘education and morality’, could not know that on July 31, Goering had instructed Heydrich ‘to carry out all the necessary preparations with regard to organizational and financial matters for bringing about a complete solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe’.
58
This was Goering’s second reference, the first having been two months earlier, on May 20, to a ‘complete’ or ‘final’ solution of what the Germans chose to call ‘the Jewish question’.
The ‘preparations’ to which Goering referred on July 31 were to involve a dozen countries, many of which, like Hungary and Italy, had not turned against their Jews in any murderous way; in others of which, like France, Belgium, Holland and Norway, the Jews,
despite discrimination and some executions, were not being physically destroyed. Even in German-occupied Poland, where several thousand Jews were dying of hunger each month in Warsaw and Lodz, two million and more Jews were alive, struggling to maintain their morale until Germany should be defeated.
Goering’s letter of July 31 made it clear that something drastic was in preparation, albeit at an early phase: a ‘complete solution’, unexplained, yet comprehensive. Meanwhile, in the East, there was to be no respite in the savage, daily slaughter. ‘It may be safely assumed’, Heydrich informed Himmler on August 1, ‘that in the future there will be no more Jews in the annexed Eastern Territories….’
59
There was no pause in the daily killings and there was to be no pause. On July 29 forty mental patients were seized in Lodz, and deported: driven away in a covered truck to an unknown destination. They were in fact shot by the Nazis in a nearby forest. The Ghetto Chronicle noted, on July 31: ‘The patients resisted in many cases.’ But the chroniclers had no idea of the fate of the deportees once they had been taken out of the ghetto.
60
Occasionally, a postcard from a Jew in German-occupied Poland reached the West. But any messages other than purely personal ones had to be skilfully disguised. On July 23 one such postcard was sent from a Jew in Radzymin to his brother in Brooklyn. Referring to three Jewish Holy days—the solemn fast day of Yom Kippur, the festival of Purim, when Jewish children dress up in colourful costumes, and the festival of Tabernacles, or Sukkot, during which Jews build a booth of trellis and greenery, the message read: ‘We are eating as on Yom Kippur, clothed as at Purim, and dwelling as at Sukkot.’
61
At Ponar, outside Vilna, the shootings had continued without respite. A Polish journalist, W. Sakowicz, who lived at Ponar, and who was himself killed during the last days of German rule in Vilna, noted in his diary:
1941. July 27, Sunday. Shooting is carried on nearly everyday. Will it go on for ever?
The executioners began selling the clothes of the killed. Other garments are crammed into sacks in a barn at the highway and taken to town.
People say that about five thousand persons have been killed in the course of this month. It is quite possible, for about two hundred to three hundred people are being driven up here nearly every day. And nobody ever returns….
1941. July 30, Friday. About one hundred and fifty persons shot. Most of them were elderly people. The executioners complained of being very tired of their ‘work’, of having aching shoulders from shooting. That is the reason for not finishing the wounded off, so that they are buried half alive.
August 2, Monday. Shooting of big batches has started once again. Today about four thousand people were driven up…. shot by eighty executioners. All drunk. The fence was guarded by a hundred soldiers and policemen.
This time terrible tortures before shooting. Nobody buried the murdered. The people were driven straight into the pit, the corpses were trampled upon. Many a wounded writhed with pain. Nobody finished them off.
62
Such executions were now a daily occurrence throughout German-occupied Russia. No town, no village, no hamlet was spared the search for Jews to be driven out of their houses, stripped, driven with guns and whips to the pits, and shot. In the Volhynian village of Misosz a German cameraman recorded the last moments of a group of women and children being led to their execution.
63
On August 1, in Kishinev, more than a thousand Jews were shot. That same day, at Ukmerge, ‘254 Jews and 42 Jewesses’ were among those murdered by Lieutenant Hamann’s Einsatzkommando. On August 2, in Kovno, Hamann listed his victims as ‘170 Jewish men, 1 USA Jew, 1 USA Jewish woman, 33 Jewish women, 4 Lithuanian communists’.
64
On August 3, from Czernowitz, the local Einsatzgruppe reported the execution of 682 Jews, out of 1,200 arrested. They had been shot, the report added, ‘in collaboration with the Rumanian police’. At Kotin, ‘150 Jews and Communists were liquidated’. At Mitau ‘the 1,550 Jews who still remained’ had been ‘removed’ from the population, ‘without any exception’.
65
That same day, at Stanislawow, several hundred Jewish doctors, lawyers and other professionals were rounded up and shot, among them the forty-one-year-old Dr Boleslaw Fell, who had practised in Warsaw before the war; Ernestyna Fach, a graduate
of the University of Nantes; and her sister, Dr Klara Fach.
66
On August 4, First Lieutenant Hamann’s squad murdered 326 Jews, 41 Jewesses, 5 Russian and 4 Lithuanian Communists at Panevezys. On August 5, at Rasainiai, he noted the murder of ‘213 Jewish men and 66 Jewish women’.
67
That same day, in its summary of past executions, the Berlin ‘Situation Report’ noted the killings of 1,726 Jews in Lvov, 128 in Brest-Litovsk, and 941 in Bialystok.
68
These random samples, for five consecutive days, show a total of some 7,800 Jews murdered. They do not include several dozen equally terrible episodes elsewhere in the East during those same five days, or the hundreds of Jews shot on each of those five days on the continuing death marches from Bessarabia towards the River Dniester, during which time Jews also died each day in the Bessarabian transit camp at Edineti.
69
In Dvinsk, a ghetto had been set up at the end of July in the suburb of Griva. ‘Thousands upon thousands of people,’ Maja Zarch later recalled, ‘with hardly any sanitary facilities, no food; with only one or two taps for water.’ The overcrowding was almost unbearable, its horrors augmented by a summer heat wave. But in the first week of August relief was offered. According to a German announcement, all old and sick Jews would be taken to a less uncomfortable place. ‘Within minutes’, Maja Zarch recalled, ‘there were so many volunteers that queues were being formed. Any place, they thought, could only be better than this.’
A few days later, a similar offer to be resettled elsewhere was made to all parents with small children. Once more, Maja Zarch witnessed the sequel:
This time again, the flood of people who wanted to go was enormous. Even people who did not have children tried to get in. Everyone who wanted to go was taken. In a day or two, strange rumours started to filter through. Someone heard from non-Jews who lived out of town that for a day and a night shooting took place at a certain place where no one was allowed to go. Slowly the picture emerged—there were definitely fresh mass graves! But even then people would not believe it. It cannot happen! How could innocent children be shot? For what purpose?
70
As the Einsatzkommando units advanced, several hundred Jewish communities, mostly those in villages and small towns, were destroyed completely. At the same time, Jews in the larger towns and cities were forced, after the initial killings, into closed ghettos. Each ghetto was ordered to set up a Jewish Council, which received from day to day the German demands, and which was made responsible for the regulation and maintenance of daily life within the ghetto.
To safeguard what could be safeguarded, the Jews needed the best Jewish Councils, and the best Council Chairmen, they could find. In Kovno, on 5 August 1941, no Jewish leader had been willing to accept the position of Chairman: to be the vehicle of German wishes, whims and cruelty. But someone was needed, and Dr Elchanan Elkes, a doctor, and a leading Zionist, who had already declined the position, was appealed to in these words:
The Jewish community of Kovno stands on the brink of destruction. Our daughters are being raped, and our sons executed. Death appears at our windows. Fellow Jews! The German oppressor demands that we appoint an
Oberjude
, but what we need is a faithful community leader. In this historic hour, the most appropriate candidate among us is Dr Elkes. Therefore, we appeal to you, Dr Elkes: In the eyes of the German criminals you will fill the position of
Oberjude
, but to us you will be the community leader.
We are aware of the fact that the position demands responsibility and is fraught with dangers never before encountered by Jews. Nevertheless, to stand at the helm of our community is both a great duty and a command of the Almighty Himself in this fateful hour. We shall be with you to the end, until the day of redemption when we leave this ghetto—which is in itself an
exile within an exile—and you lead us from slavery to freedom in our Holy Land.
And now, we beg you: Assume, without fear, the position as our leader, for those who perform a holy mission shall meet no evil thanks to the prayers of many. Amen.
1
‘If this be the situation,’ Elkes replied, ‘and you think that it is my duty to accept the post, then I shall do.’ Three young lawyers then went up to Elkes and said to him: ‘Dr Elkes, we shall help you in whatever way we can.’ One of those three lawyers, Abraham Golub, later recalled Elkes’s qualities: ‘Never in the Kovno ghetto was a Jew handed over at the request of the Gestapo—such a thing was unheard of.’
2
Dr Elkes was also to give active help to Jews in the ghetto who wished to train in the use of arms, to escape to the partisans, and to provide the partisans with equipment.
3
Members of the Jewish Councils throughout the newly conquered areas reacted in different ways to the German demands, and threats. In August 1941, in the village of Kamien Koszyrski, the Chairman of the Jewish Council, Shmuel Verble, was ordered to deliver a list of eighty names. He did so, unaware of the purpose of the list. But when, after handing it over, he learned that the Germans intended to kill all those on the list, he went at once to the local German police post and asked to be included. His request was accepted. He was shot last: the eighty-first victim.
4